


The Sea is Calm Tonight

by FaustianAspirant



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:24:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaustianAspirant/pseuds/FaustianAspirant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose deliberates. Jade understands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sea is Calm Tonight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gelbwax (prufrocks)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrocks/gifts).



> Written in response to this prompt from gelbwax: “A sweet, snuggly moment in the (romantic? sexy? platonic? you decide!) friendship of Rose and Jade. Maybe they've curled up to watch clouds or count stars and talk; maybe they're curled around separate computers. Maybe they wish they could be curled up together counting stars, but instead they're on opposite sides of the world. Pre-game or during game or in an alternate universe where the game never happened, fic or art, it doesn't matter to me :)”
> 
> I hope this corresponds at least vaguely to what was requested. There is, at the very least, a marginal amount of stargazing. To say nothing of a considerable amount of Jade/Rose.
> 
> This was written a few updates after Cascade came out – and was, to my eternal despair, promptly jossed in every way imaginable. It was almost impressive. Nonetheless. Consider it an alternative timeline. A wildly alternative, far fluffier timeline. Oh yes, and the title is a reference to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, because apparently I am incapable of titling a fic without recourse to Victorian and/or Modernist poetry. Enjoy!

They rendezvous at the Land of Light and Rain.

This is a little disconcerting. It has changed. Every shimmering lake and pastel-hued mountain has been plunged into premature dusk. The displacement of their entire incipisphere must have disturbed something on a planetary level, as it has put an end to this world’s perpetual brightness - introducing, for the first time, balance between day and night. Now darkness harmonises with the rush of the waves that lap at Rose’s bare feet, and as the cool veil of midnight falls about her shoulders, she cannot help but feel thankful. Here, where the gloom seeps along the horizon like a stain, effacing the bright clouds, and the garrulous breeze has dropped to a whisper – here, there is freedom to think.

Across the water lie the cliffs from which she tore chunks; the bitten-edged aftermath of her personal battlefield. Her land is a rusted fairground after hours, shorn of all ornamentation. She feels as though she is surrounded by so much dead machinery: the playbill-strewn muddle of an emptied theatre; the darkening husk of an ageing session. This place was ready for her. Now, like a harried host to a presumptuous guest, it withdraws all support.

And now, her laptop chimes.

gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT]  
GG: soooo gamzee tried to put soap in the microwave, terezis STILL hogging the bathroom, and karkat and john have spent most of the day ranting about the lack of decent movies you have at home  
GG: and ill be honest here rose  
GG: the one we ended up watching with the subtitles and the opera singer and all those long camera shots of paris in the rain didnt make a whole lot of sense to anyone   
TT: Slander! ‘Diva’ is perfectly intelligible.  
GG: well, overall it was pretty cool i guess!  
GG: beats staring aimlessly out at the waves ;)  
TT: How do you know that’s where I am?   
GG: look up at the window :P

Rose duly glances up at the second floor balcony; squints at the indeterminate shapes of the room behind it.

TT: There’s no-one at the window, Jade.   
GG: i know!  
GG: thats because im right here :D

Quickly, Rose turns.

She is.

The beach proves difficult to navigate shoeless and Jade stumbles twice as she picks her way across the pebbled shore. Rose remains still.

“You know everyone else is having fun inside, right?” She blinks up wryly at Rose, face flushed a little from the cold.

“I know.”

“And you know it’s not _actually_ your Elder Gods-given duty to stand out here and mope all day, _right_?” She is close now; eyes clear and relentlessly green enough for Rose to avert her gaze.

“Sacrilegious twaddle. I was assured it was contractual.”

Jade’s smile recedes a touch, and there is a fractional pause. Rose bites her lip. Here they are again, trying to bridge some unfathomable gap, with words that connect but do not quite align. Temperament-wise, they travel close – and yet, they are not quite adjacent; they collide, and glance off at odd angles.

Jade fixes her with a compassionate look, and Rose takes a shallow extra breath.

“So is it one thought that’s been distracting you, or just, you know – _thinking_ , in general?”

Rose blinks at that; but no, the question is serious. “Oh, I daresay I’m just about capable of entertaining multiple notions.”

This time, Jade wrinkles her nose - her smile becomes, if possible, somehow gentler, and Rose feels a small thrill of relief; this time, they harmonise.

“Tell me one of them, then,” says Jade.

And Rose thinks, tell her – what? That she cannot shake off this clinging preoccupation with what they lost – not they, personally, but the earth, but the whole of human civilisation? That, suddenly, this fraught bout of adventurism seems wholly selfish; that they have robbed their world of its culture? That the pressure of making amends and beginning the universe afresh is so great as to be laughable?

That she hates her own reserve, and talking to – even _looking_ at Jade feels invasive, like fingertip smears on a pane of bright glass.

And that, overall, it is lucky that world-making is not their prerogative, anymore.

“I was thinking that, you, Jade Harley, are a menace to modern science,” she says, eventually, with a chuckle. “Space-bending abilities and all. Somewhere in the endless folds of paradox space, a thousand physicists just woke up weeping into their morning weetabix for reasons they can’t explain.” She brushes a strand of hair from her eyes, a little self-consciously. “Planetary realignment? For shame. Collectively, I think we’ve violated at least half the fundamental laws of the universe.”

“Forget them,” laughs Jade. “We’ll make new ones.”

Softer now. “We’re not really in a position to make anything.”

A flicker of recognition lights across Jade’s features. Rose, taken aback, realises that she actually understands.

The wind floods through in earnest, carrying a momentary chill. “It bothers you,” says Jade.

“I’m – ambivalent,” Rose concedes.

“It’s OK to be scared,” Jade tells her.

Rose turns away. Shivers a little. “That was sneaky,” she observes, lightly. “I never admitted to being scared.”

Jade responds with a short asymmetrical shrug.

They both look away, in wordless retreat. Apparently sensing that to pursue the thought would be pointless, Jade turns instead to the shoreline, tiptoeing lightly across the white scurf of foam on the sand. Every time a wave draws close to her feet, she gives a playful squeak and stumbles out of reach, only to tentatively chase it back again. Rose finds herself watching, entranced and half ashamed. She succumbs to that awful rush of fevered objectification: drinking in the tapered slope of Jade’s waist; the curve of her jaw; and her in her totality – soft, slender and almost alien, a dog-eared silhouette.

And smiles, briefly. In that instant, Jade looks round and smiles back. It is almost an accident.

She pauses mid-stride to catch the moment, and nearly loses balance; sprints back towards Rose, arriving breathless and damp, glasses peppered with sea-spray. When she takes Rose’s hand, it is so unexpected that Rose almost flinches.

“Let’s watch the stars,” she says, all chapped lips and exuberance.

Rose does not look up. Instead, she looks straight at Jade. “There are no stars.”

“You can see the other planets from here - close enough to make out colours. They count!”

She sniffs. “We know them already; there’s no charm in distance.” Also, it really is cold, and this is a tad too whimsical to be tolerated.

“Come on, we can sit down and make up names for new constellations or something. It’ll be fun!”

Rose shoots her a sidelong glance. “You’ve held them in the palm of your hand. Surely that’s enough.”

“Rose, will you _look_ at the _goddamn stars_ with me already –!“

“OK!” Conceding defeat, she turns her gaze duly skywards. “All right, I’m looking. Here I am, staring rather gormlessly up into a starless void, as per request. I can see the Land of Wind and Shade off to the right – which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a thrilling spectacle, and – ahm.”

Jade has stepped behind her, looping both arms tightly around her waist. She tucks her chin over Rose’s shoulder, hair landing ticklish about her neck - and she smells of heat, and sand, and stale shampoo. Rose can feel each tepid little puff of air as Jade giggles against her cheek.

They stand pressed together like that for the space of a few moments, scanning the blank sky for absent constellations. Though all but void, the sky itself is not matte, but velvet - with textured depths, threaded by inscrutable strands of almost-light. It appears – malleable, respondent: fully attuned to the hushed voice of the sea; soft, sympathetic and shifting.

“Jade,” says Rose - searching wildly for the right words, and catching a few at random - “I’m no good at _beginnings_ –“

But if that makes only marginal sense to her, it must be meaningless for her friend, and she could kick herself for setting them at cross purposes again.

And yet – perhaps not. Instantly, Jade wheels her around so that they stand face to face; hands clamped earnestly down on her shoulders. No space for quiet averted eyes. “You,” she says, seriously, “are basically the best thing ever.”

 _And you_ , thinks Rose, _are achingly beautiful_.

But she covers her eyes in the crook of Jade’s shoulder and they rest there, semi-embraced, until the water licks at their ankles. And then, the solid warmth of her is unexpectedly absent; Jade breaks away, in order to examine the floor, kneeling. Rose shivers a little: more surprised than necessarily cold; but a little cold nonetheless. She had thought they were finally getting _somewhere_ ; finally meeting in the middle, on bridges of their own devising. But never for more than a moment; here, they veer off again -

"Hey,” whispers Jade. “Look at this.”

She wafts an arm through the water – and, within seconds, her hand is swathed in a gentle, bluish glow, like the milky after-impression of strong light.

“Phosphorescence,” mutters Rose.

Jade looks up again, half-amused. “I know,” she says. And she strikes down, hard, at the water’s surface, scattering dozens of lambent droplets across the waves.  
Rose’s first bizarre thought is _ah, so that’s where the stars went_. Her second is a more explicable flurry of panic as, after a resounding splash, she finds herself, all of a sudden, sodden.

“That,” she says, brushing the worst of the chill, glimmering water from her tunic, “was completely unprovoked.”

Jade just bites her lip, grins, and splashes her again.

This repeated act of aggression acts as trigger to one of the most energetic and remorseless of waterfights ever to occur on this side of paradox space. They chase each other from one end of the beach to the next in shrieking, manic exhilaration, subsiding into hysterical laughter as they emerge shaking and drenched.

Later, when they both collapse together against the sand, numb from adrenaline and limp from mirth, Rose breathes a slow sigh and extends a cold, wet hand to grip Jade’s. Their fingers lace together as a matter of course.

With her free hand, Jade points upwards, lazily tracing the distance between each bright, marble-sized planet. The vivid Land of Wind and Shade, a burst of blue, nestled amidst black. The Land of Frost and Frogs, hanging fragile and pale, like a sphere of glass. The searing, flaring Land of Heat and Clockwork – a red stain above the horizon.

“I guess if you tried _really_ hard, and squinted a bit,” she says, thoughtfully, “they could make a – a camel? Or an open book, or something?”

Rose considers. “Carve out a frontal lobe or two,” she says, “and squint to a truly _heroic_ extent, and they could be a double helix. Or an unfurled tentacle.” Pause. “A gull on the breeze? A short, blunt human pyramid?”

Jade narrows her eyes, experimentally. “How about a heart?”

“Cheap, Harley.”

Jade snickers, and twines her fingers into Rose’s hair.

Rose nestles closer, suddenly _exhausted_. “I could grow to like beginnings, you know. If that’s not a contradiction in terms.”

“It sort of is.”

An airy shrug. “Call it continuation, then.”

So they continue. They talk in languid bursts throughout the night, trading transient thoughts and contented quips - revelling in the luxury of each other. And as dawn seeps through, scattering fragments of light across the faceted crystal ridges of her land, Rose allows herself a moment of something approaching awe. Iridescence stirs; darts across the dark like a sprinting cat. The three planets blaze like shimmering emblems.

She thinks that she cannot predict this; she has lost the thread entirely – and delights in the changeability of every instant.


End file.
